Pelosi on the ObamaCare ruling: “Total victory”

posted at 10:01 pm on June 28, 2012 by Allahpundit

I figured we’d wind down D-Day with a little extra motivation for everyone to turn out this fall. Who better than Nancy to provide it? The image of her gloating when the House passed ObamaCare, waving around that giant ceremonial gavel like it was the Lombardi Trophy, alone probably accounted for half the seats the GOP picked up in the midterms. A few more soundbites like this can probably deliver Ohio and Michigan.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday credited the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) with driving the success of the Democrats’ healthcare law – even from his grave…

“I knew that when he left us he would go to heaven and help pass the bill,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “And now he can rest in peace. His dream for America’s families has become a reality.”

Forget what I said about Pelosi’s “victory” comment being a strong motivator; this is a strong motivator. Although, to be honest, I hope she’s right. As an atheist, I have a keen interest in the bar for admission into heaven being low just in case I’m wrong about the hereafter. If a guy can leave a woman to drown and still make into heaven, where he’s free to beam socialist inspiration into the minds of Democratic leaders, then dude, I’m in like flynn.

Oh, more good news: Pelosi forgot Brian Terry’s name on the House floor today during the run-up to Holder’s contempt vote. Maybe Teddy can straighten her out during their next seance.

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Right now, I pay for my health insurance plan through my employer. Its a pretty good price, considering I guess because they buy in a group.

Under Obamacare, my employer will either just tell me they aren’t going to offer health insurance anymore, or they will tell me I’m no longer an employee and I’ll have to work for them as an independent contractor, which I really don’t want to do, because I’ve gone down that road before and not crazy about being stuck with the self employment tax. It is a profit killer.

so thanks Nancy and co. I only pray that some day you and your buddies have to eat the equivalent of this sh*t sandwich you’re putting me through. Thanks a ton for taking away my choices.

Another thing, where are all these doctors that are supposed to accept all these new patients? Won’t it be fun trying to get an appointment. Better get your health issues taken care of now, while you still can.

Sorry Nancy. Unless he had a deathbed conversion, he’s too busy wailing and gnashing to give a flip about any earthly accomplishments. His only agony is that there’s nothing he can do to spare his still living friends and family from his fate.

If we don’t get out there and vote in huge numbers and get back the Senate, take the White House, and retain the House, then game over.

Decoski on June 28, 2012 at 11:18 PM

Again, I think David Frum is a worm, but I do agree with him on this topic; we can get the numbers, but it won’t matter. The right numbers of the wrong people are still not going to do the right thing – and the GOP continues to prove that for the most part, they are not the right people.

Get the WH, the House, and the Senate; there will still be enough worthless scumbags in the GOP Senate to torpedo repeal. In the end, they don’t really want smaller government, they just want to be in charge of it.

I’m not speculating – look at them, look at the evidence. We castigate the libs for ignoring the evidence that what they want is folly. If you think GOP majorities are going to ‘fix this’, you, too, are ignoring the evidence.

I hate liberals so much. I will never hire one. I know you can’t ask about political affiliation in an interview but I will try to find out and if I can’t then I won’t hire them. I won’t even get my car worked on by one. I will even ask my waiter or waitress if he or she is a democrat and if they are, I won’t leave a tip regardless of how good the service is. I will find out before I ever do business with one ever again. It’s past time for these damn liberals to start paying a price because they are destroying the country.

“Total Victory” for me will be the day the people of San Francisco finally wise up and throw this vile evil witch out of office once and for all! If anything, Pelosi succeeded in firing me up personally yesterday, so that I will now work as hard as I can to insure that Obama is not re-elected in the fall and that the Democrats suffer the worst political defeat in their entire sordid history in the fall as well, so that we can turn full power back over to the Republicans and make sure this vile TAX is never allowed to see the light of day in 2014!

As for Chief Justice John Roberts, here is a new title for him to hang around his neck…………….COWARD!

Pilamaye? I’m still holding secret hope that this sets Obamacare up for starvation. If the feds can’t toss the costs of Medicaid on the states, then they can’t hide the true costs. And a conservative Congress could unfund it and kill it off just as effectively as full repeal. And of course, a conservative Congress with fully developed gonads could do the full repeal thing.

Keep praying. But stock up on food, water and other necessities (especially the kind that come with a “caliber” stamped on them). Just in case.

The Dem’s won this battle but will lose the war. Why? Because the Supreme Court had it right – the Mandate is a tax (Obama lied all along that it was not and still lies to this day it is not a tax). Also, the final part of this ruling was that, in sum and substance, if the majority of Americans do not like this health care bill than they can vote out the current elected officials in the WH. Come this November, this is what will actually happen. The Supreme Court just handed Romney the presidency on a silver platter. When he takes the WH, Romney (and the Republican controlled Congress) will repeal this health care bill.

We have one last chance in November to avoid becoming the Peoples Republic of North America. Fail to do so and this once great nation is history. Who would have thought we would live to see the total demise of America?

President Romney will call a press conference in the Rose Garden and announce that he is granting amnesty to the American taxpayer and will not enforce the IRS portion of the Obamacare law.
What will Nancy do then – try to tell the MSM that’s illegal?

Chemicalpeelosi causes me to reconsider my residency in the Golden Goose State. I really hate it here. Colonel Crockett said it best in 1835 when his Congress was violating the Constitution:

“We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.”
~ David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35

All assets not deemed necessary for the barest of existence will now be confiscated by your Government overlords. The Democrats have finally achieved their Century plus goal of destroying the American middle class.

Trying (trying!) to look at Pelosi objectively, setting aside all the loopy Bidenesque thoughtlessness, she is a prime example of “I got mine”. She doesn’t need to worry about health care because as long as she may be around her golden House benefits and personal wealth will always allow her to afford doctors. This shelters her from any view of the effects of what she has wrought on the rest of us. For American families this is a disaster. Doctors will grow ever more scarce, and so also expensive. Eventually we’ll all be thrown into these exchanges, which for all intents and purposes will be public clinics with long waits, aging equipment and staffed by ever more disinterested personnel of dwindling ability.

Chief Justice Roberts says that the court is not responsible for protecting the electorate from the consequences of its choices, but somehow there needs to be protection from, just for instance, the mindless choices of the insane voters in Pelosi’s district. Perhaps if term limits are not possible then at least a Constitutional Amendment limiting terms of leadership roles for candidates in ultra-safe districts. They contract a variation of the Senatoritis affliction. The seniority gives too much power and isolation for one person. It would be tough enough for people with strength and integrity, but it’s at its worse with craven marginal personalities like a Pelosi or a Rangel. A phenomenon not foreseen by the genius founders.

Nobody sane is arguing against health care reform, but the leviathan that is the PPACA is a monstrous government expansion/power grab that benefits mostly those who don’t have to live under its draconian taxes and regulations. Proponents of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law argue that it will provide health care to millions who currently don’t have it, but there are still tens of millions who will not be covered, and most of them are working adults. There are provisions in the law that many people like, such as children on their parents’ health insurance to age twenty-six. But the more this 2000 page monstrosity sees the daylight, the more we find ourselves taxed, and taxed, and taxed for the privilege of being herded into a health care system that will increase costs, necessitate delays of service, and potentially codify denials of treatment.

We are taxed on our income, our investments, our inheritances, our purchases, and now, the SC says it’s constitutional to tax us for what we don’t buy. Whose interest does it serve to tax people for something they don’t do? It most decidedly is not in the interest of the person being taxed. How the Court could find an individual government mandate, with the full weight of the IRS behind it, to buy something that we either don’t want or don’t need is beyond the pale of nanny state intervention into personal freedom. What shall they tax us on next, the fact that we didn’t buy broccoli this week or that we didn’t join a union (yes, that’s all of you in states that have no “right to work” laws)? What happens to people like my son, who is twenty-two and works full time but doesn’t have full benefits through his company? He can’t really afford health insurance (he is currently on his father’s policy) and doesn’t qualify for Medicaid, so he will be taxed because he works for the wrong employer and isn’t poor/unemployed. Again, whose interest does it serve to burden a population with such as this, and at a time when the country can least afford it? It most decidedly is not in the interest of those who are stuck with the tab.

If this law is so good, why was it necessary to pass it hastily, in the dead of night, behind closed doors, excluding Republicans from meetings and votes, using the nefarious process of “reconciliation,” a misnomer for “end run around the people?” This is a 2000 page bill, for which innumerable regulations have yet to be written. Those in Congress who were being forced to voted on it admitted that they hadn’t read it. Even then Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we would have “read it to find out what’s in it.” What?! Health care reform had waited for years and years, and suddenly it was wise and careful to pass an enormously complicated bill without so much as having read it? Really?! There are those of us out here in the voting public who are quite well informed and well educated who would have been happy to review the bill and publish an opinion on it. Why was it not posted and vetted by the public for 72 hours prior to a congressional vote, as President Obama had promised during his campaign? Because Democrats knew exactly what would happen if it was posted because public opinion was already against it. Pelosi was right in that we would have pass it before we could find out what was in it because they sure weren’t going to tell us ahead of time.

So, unless Republicans can gain a majority in both houses and in the White House and repeal the PPACA, we are doomed to the already failed socialist policies under whose weight Europe is currently collapsing. Why do we continue to try this experiment “just one more time” to see if we can get it right? Why do people not learn the lesson of history that government, left to its own devices, can only grow and expand until it has complete control over people’s lives? Well, this comes pretty close. Those who are in favor of this law will change their opinion pretty quickly once they are on the receiving end of an IRS audit for non-compliance because they thought it was all going to be “free.” Check out the number of new IRS employees are being hired to enforce this law. If this is such a great law, why would it need such vigorous enforcement against a citizenry it ostensibly benefits? Again, whose interest is being served to throw the full weight of the government against ordinary citizens for breaking a law with which they can’t comply? It most decidedly is not in the interest of those citizens who have to live under the weight of its oppressive mandate.

Folks, ObamaCare is a killer for innovation. It is already being felt among healthcare related startups who are seeking investment capital for life saving innovations and / or improve the quality of life. However, investment capital is drying up. We are impacting healthcare in significant ways some of which will not become evident for many years to come.

The medical device tax is an excise tax. Liberals are fond of behavior modification through excise taxes. For example, part of the rationale behind sin (excise) taxes on cigarettes or alchohol is that the added costs reduce consumption as well as a way or generating revenue for the state. Is the market for medical devices immune to the economic forces? Do device taxes not discourage innovation and entrepreneurial activity? Of course they do.

I recently put together a presentation to brief the CEO of a drug development company on the implications of ObamaCare. Contrary to common perception, the most innovative part of the healthcare occurs in smaller companies, not large corporations. Smaller companies tend to be better at innovation and the data supports this reality. However, small companies are the real losers of ObamaCare.

Having spent some time looking into this I’d like to share excerpts of my presentation to arm folks on the board and within our community with data and information. This is important stuff and we all need to get our head around what this all means and convey this information to others. If there is an interest from the community, I’d be happy to source the data and information. I know this is a little long and I will break it up into a number of posts. Obviously graphs can’t be uploaded, but I hope some of this will be instructive.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) (“Obamacare”) was proposed as a way to bend the rising cost curve of healthcare and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010.

Health care spending is growing at about 1.5x the rate of growth of GDP projected to reach $4.6 trillion and comprise 19.8 percent of GDP by 2020. The government-sponsored share of health spending is projected to increase from 45 percent in 2010 to about 50 percent by 2020.

The health reform law established the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) as an independent advisory board with a $3 billion budget to support comparative effectiveness research.

Per its mandate, the PCORI will be responsible for “comparing options for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for specific health problems; improving health care systems; informing patients and other stakeholders; addressing disparities among patient populations and health outcomes; and designing research to be patient-centered.”

This federal body will undertake “comparative-effectiveness research” (CER) ostensibly to determine whether newer, more expensive treatments work as well as their older, cheaper counterparts.

4 Ways CER Impacts Innovation

1)CER will force producers to conduct internal CER trials to evaluate the efficacy of submitting their drugs or technologies for government review. All those additional tests will increase R&D costs.

2)As the government pays for about half of all medical care, the government is incentivized to favor older, less expensive forms of treatment over newer and more costly methods. This raises the risk of nonapproval or limited approval, both for federal coverage programs, and generally.

3)Research and development is often a lengthy process that is capital intensive and for which the benefit may not be realized for many years. The R&D process is more prone to political and budgetary pressures to deliver budget savings in the near term over long term health benefits.

4)CER will lengthen the amount of time required for a drug or medical technology to achieve regulatory approval. Each additional day a new treatment spends in limbo is a day it can’t try to recapture its R&D costs through patent-protected exclusive sales.

According to researchers at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, the average drug takes $1.3 billion and about a decade to develop. About 30% of that cost comes during the clinical trial phase, when CER would have the greatest impact.

Pacific Research Institute’s Dr. Ben Zycher indicates that the government-led CER process will depress investment in pharmaceutical and medical device research and development by 10% to 12% or about $10 billion per year

Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the fifteen presidential appointees tasked with finding and implementing ways to control Medicare spending from the top-down. The primary mechanism available to IPAB to control spending is to make adjustments to reimbursement and incentives for providers.

While IPAB is statutorily prohibited from “rationing,” the statute includes no formal definition, and the board will still have to restrict access to providers, services, reduce reimbursements and/or treatments to hold down costs.

In short, IPAB opens the door to de facto rationing of care with less congressional oversight.

ObamaCare relies on three powerful levers to effectively regulate the healthcare market

1)A prolonged regulatory process which increases research and development process costs and uncertainty.

2)A determination on the relative value of new therapies and innovations and a mechanism to put downward pressure on economic incentives to develop them.

3)A medical device tax is the third lever by which government seeks to regulate the market.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) imposes an excise tax of 2.3 percent on medical equipment and supply sales rather than profits. In other words, it cuts into the top line, not the bottom line.

The 2.3% excise tax will be levied on all types of medical devices, from heart stents and pacemakers to MRIs and ultrasounds. Because the new tax is on revenue, not profit, a small company that is not yet in the black would bear the biggest brunt. This tax will hit medical device companies especially hard in states that are leading the way in medical innovation; states like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, California, New York, and Massachusetts

Because incentives to invest in the research and development of new medical technologies are driven by perceived returns, the excise tax on durable medical equipment and medical supplies can be predicted to reduce such investment. The National Science Foundation estimates the excise tax will effectively reduce investment by about 10 percent annually, or about $2 billion during 2013 through 2020.

KPMG, the auditing firm, compiled a survey of 190 financial executives from the medical devices industry. The firm found that 40% of respondents said their companies are contemplating actions such as price increases and cost reductions, including layoffs.
The medical device industry employs an estimated 400,000 people. It is estimated that the device tax with reduce employment from 14,000-47,100.

As syndicated columnist George Will observed:
“Cook Medical is no longer planning to open a U.S. factory a year. Boston Scientific, planning for a more than $100 million charge against earnings in 2013, recently built a $35 million research and development facility in Ireland and is building a $150 million factory in China. (Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well-treated.)

Stryker Corp., based in Michigan, blames the tax for 1,000 layoffs. Zimmer, based in Indiana, is laying off 450 and taking a $50 million charge against earnings. Medtronic expects an annual charge against earnings of $175 million. Covidien, now based in Ireland, has cited the tax in explaining 200 layoffs and a decision to move some production to Costa Rica and Mexico. ”

Venture capitalists are feeling less confident about making investments in 2012, with 58 percent of them predicting fewer investments in biopharmaceutical and medical device businesses, according to a national survey from the National Venture Capital Association.

“The landscape for medical devices is almost worse than bleak,” said Todd Leonard, executive director of the Minnesota Angel Network said at the LifeScience Alley Conference earlier this month. “Traditional venture capitalists have really left the space.”

Investors said they are reluctant to invest in new medical device start-ups in recent years because it’s unclear how much time and money it will take to get a device approved.

Companies face an increasingly difficult regulatory and reimbursement environments, lengthy time to liquidity and the anemic IPO market.

Part of the problem is there are more CEOs that want to raise money in 2012 than there are investors able to give that amount of money. angel investor Mike Swenson “There is no capital.”

In the past, Minnesota has ranked among the top 13 states in the amount of venture capital companies attracted, from in-state sources or not. Last year it ranked 20th, just ahead of Rhode Island.

Venture capital investment in Minnesota companies fell 48 percent in 2010 to $139.5 million, the lowest amount in 15 years of record keeping, according to the MoneyTree Report from the National Venture Capital Association and PwC.

Thanks for your indulgence but I think this stuff is important to know and share with others. These are the costs of ObamaCare and are quantifiable. We don’t have to wait to begin to see its effects or have a reasonable understanding of how it will impact healthcare for people going forward.

We need to take this fight on. If anyone is interested in sources of the data and information, I’d be happy to provide it.

Thanks. I know it is long but I sincerely believe we collectively need to dig in to the minutia so we can understand the long term quality of care costs associated with the bill.

It is easy to make simple comparisons to suggest that we over pay for healthcare. A common metric is the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare. Sudan pays less for healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the US but I don’t think anyone finds that comparison instructive.

What is suggested is that there is profiteering occurring and somehow we can change the market dynamics and still get the same or greater level of care. To substantiate this claim, folks frequently point to countries with more socialized healthcare systems, Canada, the UK etc…

Collectively we pay more but we also have better access to goods and services. This is quantifiable in terms of the number of cat scanners per one thousand, number of life saving and quality of life procedures, access to new and improved drug therapies, physicians per thousand etc….

We also enjoy an entrepreneurial culture that is the envy of the world and this includes healthcare and we are killing it. The cost will be born over the coming years primarily by the middle class in the form of more deaths and reduced quality care.

Once you begin killing off the healthcare industry and transforming it into an arm of the government, how do you revive it once you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake?

She’s right, a total victory, she knew it was constitutional, however I don’t remember her reasoning to have included the tax power.

rjoco1 on June 29, 2012 at 12:56 PM

This bill was unconstitutional as it was presented, period. 5 Justices stated that the entire bill was unconstitutional on the grounds it was written and argued. It was only through the concoction of Roberts that he found a needle through which he could tread this camel.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday credited the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) with driving the success of the Democrats’ healthcare law – even from his grave…

“I knew that when he left us he would go to heaven and help pass the bill,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

It wasn’t Teddy Kennedy who cast the 60th vote for cloture on Christmas Eve 2009. The only reason the Democrats reached 60 votes for cloture was because they changed the rules that Teddy Kennedy himself had pushed for in MA, and allowed the Democrat Governor to appoint Paul Kirk to fill the “Kennedy Seat” and cast a vote in favor of cloture. The voteres of MA, once given the chance, replaced Kirk with Scott Brown. If Kennedy’s original wishes had been carried out, Paul Kirk never would have been a Senator, and the Democrats never would have had 60 votes for cloture on Obamacare.